Last week marked a full year since I started my first full-time job. To celebrate, I took time to reflect on the biggest lessons I’ve learned the past 12 months.

Your lowest moments drive your highest learnings

Life after college is the first time many of us are truly on our own and sometimes life deals you with difficult circumstances. Having these low moments teaches you about how tough you can be and how much you can grow.

It is okay to say no to things that don’t bring you energy

I don’t enjoy going to bars. There is something about them that leaves me more drained than energized even when I’m with friends. When I started work, it seem part of the work culture was hanging out together at a local bar on Fridays. In the beginning I would go because I didn’t know many people in San Francisco, but I would leave after just an hour or two feeling drained. At some point I decided I’d much rather spend my Friday on a quiet dinner or reading a book – these activities brought me much energy. I am much happier as a result.

Your first year is an investment

You’re not going to be a rock star when you start. You’re going to be asked to do work that make you sense how junior or new you are. It is part of the learning opportunity.

No one will protect your non-negotiable except you

If you don’t know what is important to you, work and those around you will dictate what those things are.

Making new friends takes effort

It was so easy to make friends in college. Between classes, events, and dorms, I saw other students every moment of the day. Post-college, I’ve had to go out of my way to make new friends.

Keeping in touch with your existing friends also takes effort

People become busy, even your friends. If no one is willing to organize time together, they don’t naturally just happen.

Begin with the end in mind

There is always more work to do, but there are only 24 hours in a day. To avoid doing work that adds little value, beginning with the end in mind helps you stay focused on what is most important. What is the end product you are building towards, what is the key answer you are answering, what is the result you want to achieve?

You’re going to make mistakes on the job, that is okay

It is your first job, you’re not going to be perfect at it. Mistakes are okay, repeating them is not.

Being time poor changes your view of money

In college, I went out of my way to save money – spending an hour to find a find a PDF of a book instead of just spending $7 dollar to buy it. I was money poor and time rich. Now, for the first time in my life, I am finding myself money rich, but time poor. I could cook dinner, clean up, and save $7 dollars, but when I’m coming home so late. I’ll gladly just pay $10 for a healthy meal so I can have an hour more to sleep and rest.

Your spending creeps up if you don’t watch it

In college, a $30 dinner would make me cringe. That was a lot of money to spend on just one dinner. When I started earning money, $30 dinners still made me cringe, but as time passed the effect wore-off and $30 meals became normal. It wasn’t until the end of each month when I’m paying bills that I see the accumulative effect of the $30 meals. Stopping the spending creep will help you avoid spending more than you have and forcing you to invest in the things and experiences that are most worthwhile.

Your health will slip away if you don’t watch it

While your spending will slowly creep on you if you don’t watch it, your health slowly slips away. As time becomes scarcer after college you started to give up activities you once enjoyed to stay healthy. I’ve seen this happen to so many of my friends who used to be so active in college. If you don’t watch your health, don’t expect anyone else to.

What makes work enjoyable is a feeling of growth and support

The type of work you’re asked to do day in and out will change. Some days will make you feel so lucky to be where you are; other (many) days will make you want to quit. But what drives happiness is feeling as though you are being challenged without being too stretched and having people who care about you. The work can be tough, the hours can be long, but with supportive people the experience is more enjoyable.

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” – Abraham Lincoln

Every Sunday evening, I block out an hour before dinner to plan out the following week. The goal of this hour is to think though the best use of my time. Since time is my scarcest resource, I want to use it as effective as possible and spending an hour each week thinking about how to use my time has been responsible for adding at least 10 hours of productivity to my week.

The hour I spend every Sunday helps me think through where I want to be a week later and the path I should take to get there. Think of it as beginning a treasure hunt knowing where the treasure is and finding easiest and shortest path to get there.

How I plan for productivity

During my weekly planning session, I think about my goals for the year (usually anchored in my New Year’s Resolutions) and what I could do this week to get closer to accomplishing my those goals.

For each goal, I think about the series of small but meaningful actions I could take to get closer to accomplishing my goal. By thinking about the small activities that bring meaningful results, I leverage a) the Pareto principle and b) the cognitive load theory.

The Pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, says 80% of the output come from 20% of the input. You see this in real life, for example for the average company, the best 20% of salesman are responsible for 80% of the total sales. This is to say not all input produces the same level of output. So given how limited time is, I want to engage in those few activities that produce the majority of the results and not waste it doing activities that bring little outcome.

The cognitive load theory says that every activity we engage in requires a level of effort and mental exhaustion. This is why someone who might works with Excel all day might appear more tired than a construction worker who has been moving cement all day. The key to reducing mental exhaustion is to take as much of the thinking out of an activity as possible. For example, President Obama has someone pick his clothes each morning so he doesn’t have to think about what to wear and can focus on much more important issues.

If you can leverage both the Pareto principle and cognitive load theory in your own life, you’ll begin to accomplish more while doing less.

How I automate my successes

To give a concrete example of how my planning session works, one of my goals this year is to add 20 pounds of lean muscle. This works out to be .4 lbs. per week, so my goal each week is to gain .4 lbs., but that is vague and left to my own device, I’ll forget about it. Instead I view the “gaining .4 lbs” as an outcome I can achieve by performing a sub-set of other activities. In this case, building lean muscle is quite simple.

Eat eat more calories than my body burns

Lift heavy weights

For this example, I’ll focus on eating. My target goal is 3,200 calories each day. Which is about to 1.5 times the average. I could cook 2 extra meals, but that takes time. I could buy two extra meals, but that costs more money that needed. Instead I identify the 80/20 for getting enough calories as making and drinking three protein shakes a day in addition to my normal meals. Making the shakes take 3 minutes and consuming them 1 minute so much faster than cooking more meals and they’re cheaper than eating out 2 additional times a day. With 12 minutes a day invested, I can achieve my eating goal. It would take me more than 15 minutes to cook/eat two meals.

Once I identify the 80/20 activities, I break those activities down to smaller actions I can do with as little thinking as possible (managing my cognitive load). Each night, I make my protein shakes so I have them ready in the morning. I do this without thinking and each time I make a shake I am closer to my goal; my muscle gaining routine is automated, my .4 lbs. gains are almost certain, so reaching my 20 lbs. goal is almost certain. All it took was taking time to plan it out.

Every Sunday, I’ll go through each of my goal with the same lens: identifying the 80/20 activities and breaking those activities into small actions that I can do without thinking. The more I do it the easier it becomes to identify the small, meaningful activities I should be engaging in.

By identifying only a handful of small but meaningful actions, I begin each week with a highly targeted list of actions I can act on, not a random list of to-dos just to appear busy without having accomplished much.

Review Process

At the end of every week and before I start planning for the next, I review the progress for the previous week . I’ll mark the actions I completed and the ones I didn’t. The actions I completed indicate the progress I’ve made on my goals while the activities I didn’t give me chances to understand how I can improve.

For those activities that I didn’t complete, I try to understand why I was unable to complete them. Did I overschedule myself? Did I identify the wrong action? Did I make my goal too lofty?

If an action was too lofty but important to me, for the next week, I’ll break it down into even smaller actions to make it even easier and less time-consuming to get started. My goal is to build momentum so once I complete one small task, I’ll be prepared to move on to the next.

For example, a few weeks ago, I wanted to schedule a dentist appointment, a task that went undone. The following week, I broke the task into smaller actions: using Yelp to find a dentist that near my office and recording her number (5 mins). The next day I called her office to schedule an appointment (6 mins). Appointment booked.

Having a review process allows me to measure my progress while continuing to improve the way I reach my goals. I identify my wins for the week and learn from my failures, so they too can become wins in the future.

The first time I started getting into this routine of a weekly review was hard. I would set lofty goals and when I didn’t reach them feel disappointed; I would identify the wrong actions and felt I was spinning my wheels from week to week. I still run into these problems today, but I am much better at minimizing these after having been through so many review cycles. The first few weeks are tough, but afterwards this routine will increase your overall productivity and confidence in being able to achieve your goals.

I gave this speech to begin a meeting at Rhino Business Toastmasters in SF

Summer in Sapa (June 2015)

I keep this photo on my desk at work.

The woman in the middle is named Zer-Zer. She is a member of black Hmong tribe in Sapa, a mountainous region between China and Vietnam. Zer-Zer is married with four kids and has lived in Sapa her entire life just as her ancestors have for over 300 years. I took this photo the first day I met Zer-Zer without understanding the influence this photo would have on me after I left Sapa.

For the time my friends and I shared with Zer-Zer, her schedule became ours. A normal day for Zer-Zer and her family begins at 5:00 am. She and her three daughters spend 3 hours hiking from their home in the mountains down to the town center where the first load of tourists arrives at 8:00 am. There, Zer-Zer and her daughters sell homemade Hmong clothing among other souvenirs. On a good day, they sell all or most of everything and begin their hike back up the mountain, another 3-hour feat. On a bad day, they sell almost nothing and have the same hike but with all the clothing and items they didn’t sell. When they arrive home they build a fire and begin cooking dinner with Zer-Zer’s husband who is returning from a day of mountain mining. The family is racing to beat the sunset for once it sets; the only light source is the fire. This is what life for Zer-Zer and her family is like 7 days out of the week, 12 months out of the year, yet I never once saw anything but a smile on her face – the same one fixed in the photo.

At my current job, I work as a management consultant where I deal with demanding clients, strict deadlines, and late nights more often than I would like. There are nights I just want to go home and sleep in my own bed. Nights that make me question, “Did I really go to college for this life?”

Every time I get this feeling and I feel the mental frustration, I turn to look at this photo and I remember how Zer-Zer and her daughters never complained about having to wake up early, never complained about their 6-hour commute, and never complained about never leaving Sapa. I’m not riding a private jet from meetings to meetings, but no matter how late I stay, I’ll always be able to call an Uber or hail a taxi; Zer-Zer has a three-hour hike ahead of her. No matter where I need to fly, I’ll have a hotel room with running water waiting for me; Zer-Zer’s only access to running water is hiking to the village waterfall 20 minutes away.

In all of our lives, life can be overwhelming that we immediately focus on how we are being inconvenienced. We focus on what is wrong in our lives – what we don’t have, what we haven’t done – that we quickly forget how fortunate we already are – what we do have, what we have already accomplished. Someone somewhere in the world would look at our lives and if given a choice, choose to be us. We often forget this.

This week, when you experience an inconvenience in your own life such as a last minute request that keeps you at work or missing a bus, remember how lucky you are to have a job and to have access to transit. Remember about all the problems you don’t have to deal with that others have do day-in and day-out. Remember the Zer-Zers in your life, those who might not have been born as lucky as you, but takes what they are given, makes the most out of it, and do so with a smile.

When my grandma and grandfather escaped to the United States they wanted to create a new life for themselves and their children. They hoped that America would be the land of opportunity they had dreamt about 8000 miles away in war-torn Vietnam.

When my grandparents landed on the shores of the U.S., they indeed saw that America was the land of opportunities but never once expected anything to be given to them; they knew they had to earn it – working 16-hour factory shifts, saving every nickel they made by cooking all our meals at home, and not letting racially-driven hate crimes intimidate them.

My grandparents became my first role models, and as I grew older I was lucky to stumble upon other role models who also taught me what it took to create opportunities for myself.

1. Play your garbage minutes as if they mattered

I loved watching basketball growing up. The most exciting games were the ones that would come down to the final seconds, where the final shot would decide the fate of the game. Watching these games, I could imagine how many of the players on the court dreamt about rebounding the ball and making the winning shot for their team. But not every game comes down to the last shot. Sometimes games are decided long before the final minutes – one team has such a large lead that it is impossible for the other team to win, the coaches have substituted out their best players, and many of the fans have left. The minutes left on the clock are known as “garbage minutes.” During these minutes, the players on the basketball court aren’t household names. It doesn’t matter how good (or bad) they play. The game is already over, all is left is waiting for the game clock to hit zero before both teams can go home.

DeMarre Carroll joined the NBA in 2009. For the first four years of his career, most of DeMarre’s playing time came exclusively from garbage minutes. But watching DeMarre play you wouldn’t know the game was over unless you looked at the score box. DeMarre was given an average of 6 minutes once every 7 weeks to play. Instead of viewing his limited playing time as if they didn’t matter, he played as if the game were still on the line, bringing his energy and competitiveness. As a result, his coaches saw his potential and would give him more and more minutes each season until his seventh year (and on his fifth team) he was moved from the back of the bench and to the starting lineup. But even in the main lineup, DeMarre was the lowest paid of this five starters – the next lowest paid player made nearly three-times as much. But again DeMarre didn’t view his placement as a limit; he viewed it as an opportunity. He played as if he were the star player.

Last year, after nearly taking his team to the championship round, DeMarre ended the year by signing a 4-year, $60 million contract to be a star player for his current team. Not bad for someone who was once the lowest paid player on his teams playing “garbage minutes”. DeMarre created an opportunity where others didn’t see one. Can you imagine if DeMarre hadn’t viewed those 6 minutes as opportunities to showcase his talent, but instead viewed those as a chore and did just enough to earn his paycheck for the day? Do you think he would have the $60 million contract he has today?

In your life, you will be given your share of “garbage minutes”, task that can be done without much thought and often quickly forgotten. You can view these chores as wastes of time…or you can view them as opportunities to show people you are ready for bigger, better opportunities.

2. Help Make Others Successful

I’ve been fortunate to work for many of my role models and later mentors. Before I worked at Bain, I spent two years working at a startup called Quiet. During my two years at Quiet, I worked with Susan Cain, author of the best-seller Quiet which has sold over 2 million copies worldwide and whose TED talk has over 13 million views and her co-founder Paul Scibetta. From age 20 to 22, I managed product development, brainstormed partnership ideas, and created content. The best part about this experience was how it started.

When I was a sophomore in college, I read Quiet: The Power of Introvert and had the desire to spread the message of Quiet and serving Susan’s Quiet Revolution in any way I could. A few months later, I read an article on Fast Company that Susan was working on an online public speaking course for introverts. I found Susan’s email on her website and offered to create the course for her all for free. I meant what I said about helping spread the Quiet Revolution even if it meant working for free. Susan took me up on that offer and I spent the following summer working for Susan creating the course. Though I signed up to work for free, I worked on the project as if I was getting paid a million salary. I pour my time and energy into it when I had the chance.

I would constantly think about how the product (our course) could be better. I wanted to create a product I would be proud of even if I didn’t believe my name nor future income would be coming from it. Three months from the day I first contacted Susan, the course was completed. When Paul and Susan created Quiet, they brought me on as an intern and the first team member outside of the founders to join the company. It was an opportunity of a lifetime that was available because I was willing to help others. Instead of asking, what can someone do for you, always ask “what can I do for this person.” Once your mindset shifts from serving yourself to serving others, opportunities will present themselves.

3. Start knocking on doors

On a delayed flight last summer I had a chance to read Gillian Zoe Segal‘s Getting There where she tries to discover the traits that successful people seemed to have in common. One of the commonalities she found was a relentless drive to overcome rejection. Everyone from Spanx founder Sara Blakely to Warren Buffett dealt with rejection early on in their careers – Blakely from all the manufactures who thought her idea would never sell and Buffett from Harvard Business School. But instead of using their early rejection as a reason to stop, they used it as fuel to continue onwards.

This lesson was most clear in Segal’s interview of John Paul DeJoria, co-founder of the Patrón Spirits Company and Paul Mitchell. Before becoming an entrepreneur, DeJoria spent three years going door-to-door selling Encyclopedias. DeJoria called this 3-year period of his life one of the most transformative and if the job were still available today, he would make his kids do it to teach them the valuable lesson that he learned.

“After you’ve had 15 doors slammed in your face,” he explained, “you need to be as enthusiastic at door number 16 as you were at the first door, if you want to make a sale.” When DeJoria launched John Paul Mitchell Systems, he relied on the same skills, going from beauty salon to beauty salon getting people to buy his hair care products. John Paul Mitchell products are a household name today, but in the early days, DeJoria was lucky to even get 1 out of 5 salons to try his product. He thanked his perseverance for not losing faith and continue to push forward with every salon that rejected him. Had DeJoria stopped knocking on doors, the dual multi-million empires of Patrón Spirits Company and John Paul Mitchell wouldn’t exist today.

To get opportunity to open itself, you have to overcome the sea of “no”s. If you’re not willing to risk having the door slammed in your face, than you won’t be ready when opportunity opens its door.

4. Deliver more than others expect of you

When Noah Kagan started okdork.com, a blog about online marketing, he wanted to become an influencer in this space, but with hundreds of other bloggers and thousands of articles already on the subject it was a challenge even figuring out how to start. Instead of writing and repeating what others were already doing in the marketing space, Noah would study what was working and reverse engineered the recipe for success analyzing over 1 million internet articles to find what tended to go viral.

What Noah learned about the difference between bloggers who get over 100,000 visitors and those who get less than 100 was the quality of their content. Average bloggers wrote about the same topics. Because they wrote the same low quality content, people didn’t stick around. In the blogs that stood out, Noah found the bloggers spent more time crafting their messages and doing research. Instead of putting something together just to hit publish, these bloggers went beyond what was expected of a free online article. Noah wanted to be in the latter camp and he succeed. If you read Noah’s articles you’ll notice a few things different from your usual online marketing article. His articles have more depth than others (2000 words is his personal minimum), he backs his claims with data (personal anecdotes don’t cut it), and he doesn’t recommend anything he hasn’t done himself. Going beyond what others expected, within a year, Noah grew his site to over 100,000 visitors.

It is easy to give people the minimum because it doesn’t require any additional work. If you want to be average, then do the minimum. If you want to create opportunities, learn to exceed people’s expectations.

5. Raise your hand for the hard jobs

During my junior year of college, I was grateful to attend a talk by PepsiCo CEO, Indra Nooyi, one of only 23 women to be CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Her talk covered her journey from growing up in India to becoming one of the most powerful women in the world. When asked what the best advice she has ever been given, she quoted her father who taught her to “raise your hand for the hard jobs.”

Her father’s reasoning was that 1) people are scared of volunteering for the hard tasks – they hard for a reason – and volunteering makes you stand out 2) having to deal with hard problems forces you to grow so you can take on when harder challenges next time. Nooyi followed her father’s advice from the time she was in primary school, “I volunteered to work with the kids no one else wanted to work with” and well into her professional career “I would raise my hand for the jobs others were afraid to fail at.” Nooyi confessed she didn’t always know going in that she would be successful, but she was devoted to growing herself and making sure more bigger, better opportunities were available for her in the future. And as she volunteered for the hard job and did them successfully, the people around her started to take notice and she was given more and more opportunities, eventually taking over the role of CEO of PepsiCo in 2006.

Nooyi ended the session by reminding us, “Volunteer for the hard jobs because no one remembers the people who did the easy jobs.”

6. Make plans, not excuses

MJ DeMarco graduated college with two degrees, neither in computer science. Despite graduating without any programing knowledge, he made his wealth on the Internet and retired before 35. A former limo driver, MJ founded Limo.com in 1997 before selling his company (and later buying it back). How did someone without a tech background make his money on the Internet? MJ credits his success to one mindset: making plans, not excuses.

As a limo driver in Chicago, MJ noticed how many of his clients would ask for limo company recommendations when he took them to the airport. In the 90’s the internet was still growing and MJ saw the opportunity to create a market place for local limo companies and traveling businessmen. To turn his vision into a concrete idea, MJ read books on HTML and on running an internet business. MJ could have easily quit because he didn’t know how to code a Web site, how to design graphics, or how to manage a server, but instead of he asked, “I don’t know how to do this today, but how could I?”

Even after retiring early, MJ never stopped learning. In his book Millionaire Fastlane, MJ shares how the “make plans, not excuses” can apply to your personal life as well as your professional life. When MJ was remodeling his house, he wanted to paint the walls in a certain style. Since he was retired and had the time, he challenged himself to learn this skill. He went online and watched hours of video tutorials, went to Home Depot to buy the supplies he needed, and spent the next week practicing on cardboard boxes. When the week was over, he became proficient enough to complete the remodeling himself.

When you run into an obstacle, it is easy to come up with an excuse to quit. The opportunity lies in coming up with a plan to overcome your obstacle.

7. Come up with solutions not just problems

Life after college is a scary time. It is the first time most people have been on their own – paying their own bill, handling office politics, and dealing with the uncertainties of adulthood. No one is immune with their first contact with the real world – Jenny Blake was no exception. After graduating from UCLA and starting at Google, Jenny chronicled her journey on a blog fittingly named Life After College. She talked about problems that almost all recent graduates faced from being single in a new town to having a single digit bank account.

Jenny’s problems resonated with readers who were also recent graduates, but what made Jenny different was instead of just listing her problems, she came up with solutions. Instead of just talking about her problems with managing a budget, she shared a budget sheet; instead of talking about being single in a big city, she wrote about why being single rocks. As a result, Jenny was able to turn Life After College from just a blog into a place where recent grads could go to find solutions to their problems. Since 2007, millions of readers have passed through Life After College, found it so helpful, that Jenny was offered a book deal.

In your life, when you encounter a problem, don’t just mention the problem, come up with a solution. Anyone can come up with a list of problems, it takes extra thought to come up with a solution. At work instead of presenting your manager with the problem, come up with a recommendation of how you would solve it. Instead of saying to yourself, “I don’t have this” or “I don’t know how to do that” come up with one way you could “have this” or “know that.” In the same way people are pushed away from problem starters, people are attracted to solution creators. Be a solution creator and opportunities will always present themselves.

As my grandparents and role models taught me, opportunity are abundant but people miss it because it isn’t dressed up in pretty clothes.